Writing about the food, farmers, fishermen, and folk of Long Island's North Fork.

July 2015

07/20/2015

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Grandma Forman’s Jelly Cake is not a cake, contains no jelly and the recipe was classified information for most of the 20th century.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on July 9, 2015

My mother-in-law Helene used to tell the story of the first real dinner she cooked as a newlywed.

The highlight of the meal was a chocolate layer cake that she presented to her new husband Jack (who, thirty-five years later, would be my father-in-law) for dessert. He ate a piece; she asked him if he liked it and he said, “Yes, but how often can we eat like this?”

It was a loaded question. Jack’s own mother, who became known in the family as Grandma Forman, was revered for her Jelly Cake. That cake was a Loch Ness monster of desserts — everyone had heard of it, some claimed to have tasted it, one or two female relatives were said to have the recipe, but as far as I could tell, no one had actually made one since Grandma Forman passed sometime in the 70s.

After the chocolate layer cake episode, Helene decided home-baked desserts were a questionable use of time and effort and my husband grew up in a home where baked goods were usually purchased from a bakery and except for special occasions, dessert was fruit.

But I love to bake and the apparition of Grandma Forman’s Jelly Cake began to fascinate me. I was a member of the Forman family for two decades and had produced two grandchildren before I was handed a blue-lined index card with the secret recipe written out by hand. No nuclear code could be more closely held. To further deepen the secrecy surrounding the Jelly Cake, the recipe revealed that it is not a cake but really more of a pastry and contains preserves or jam but no jelly.

As to the question, “How often can we eat like this?” I can now say, “Quite often.”

Grandma Forman’s Jelly Cake | Charity RobeyMakes four generous pieces, eight when served with a dollop of ice cream

1. Whisk the flour, baking powder, sugar and salt together. Cut in the shortening with two knives or a pastry blender until the mixture is like small crumbs.2. Beat the egg with a fork and combine gently with the flour mixture. Add water or orange juice 2 teaspoons at a time, mixing with your hands until a handful squeezed gently just forms a ball.3. Refrigerate the ball for 40 minutes. Cut it in half.4. On lightly floured parchment or a silicone mat, roll the first half into a 9-inch circle and transfer to a 9-inch pie pan. Spread the preserves on the dough, leaving 1/2 inch around the edges jam-free.5. Roll out the second piece in a 9-inch round, place on top of the jam and pinch the top and bottom layers of pastry together, fluting the edges by pinching the dough with your thumb, pointer and middle fingers.6. Sprinkle the top with cinnamon and sugar. Brush whole milk or cream on the edges of the crust to encourage browning.7. Bake at 375 degrees for 30 minutes.

07/09/2015

The urge to help neighbors seems to seep into the soul of people who call Shelter Island home.

Carmen Chinea, who has spent summers here with her family for the last 15 years, has the health and wellness of immigrant and indigent people close to her heart, and has made it her life’s work. She is chief medical officer of HRHCare, a New York-based non-profit health provider operating health centers in the Hudson Valley and on the East End to serve the poor and the uninsured.

The child of immigrants, Carmen said the course of her life has been profoundly influenced by her own experience. Her parents, Delia and Diosdado Chinea, were born in Cuba and visiting family in New York when Castro marched into Havana in 1959. They decided not to return.

“My mother knew no English and worked in a hot dog factory,” Carmen said. “My father worked at a diner as a busboy.”

Carmen was born in a women’s clinic in West Harlem.

In her entire clan of parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, Carmen was the first to complete elementary school. She went on to high school, college, medical school and a masters in public health at Columbia University. When she started her education at five, she did not know a word of English.

By the mid 1980s, Carmen was a professional living in New York City. Before the debut of match.com, New York Magazine was famous for running personal ads that were required reading for single men and women looking for love. Carmen was hanging out with her cousins one day in 1985 and told them, “I bet I can find a husband through one of these things. They thought I was crazy.”

She soon found an ad that sounded good — “Six foot two, eyes of blue, not too good to be true. Looking for a tall non-smoking Manhattanite in the science world for a long lasting relationship.”

That ad must have sounded good to some other women too, since Carmen’s husband-to-be, Allan Richmond, got over 80 responses. He set out to meet with every single one, creating a grid that organized the respondents into a schedule of three one-hour meetings in the same restaurant, every day for weeks.

He met one woman for drinks, one for dinner and one for dessert — scheduling the most likely candidates for the dinner hour. According to Carmen, when Allan was at his table, any woman who walked into the restaurant was greeted by the maitre d’ with, “He’s over there.”

Carmen, who is 5 feet 10 inches, showed up for dinner wearing 3-inch heels, looked Allan in the eyes and a year later they were married.

About a year after that, their first child, Natalie, was born in 1987, followed by Olivia in 1989. Natalie is now in law school and Olivia headed for medical school.

After med school, Carmen got a fellowship to study nephrology at Cornell and became a kidney specialist. For 15 years, she had a solo practice in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, but said she found that “taking care of one patient at a time wasn’t enough.” She went for the masters in public health at Columbia where she learned about community health centers.

“I turned around,” she said. “I thought, Wow, if I could take an entire community like Suffolk County and change the outcomes, wouldn’t that be astronomical.”

When Carmen joined HRH Health 11 years ago, the organization ran eight health centers. They now run 24, focusing on areas with large numbers of agricultural workers, especially the East End.

Carmen pointed out that for many Shelter Island workers, the HRH Community Health Center in Greenport is their primary healthcare solution. This care extends and improves the lives of the gardeners, farmers, maids and restaurant workers who make possible the fine homes, green lawns and heirloom tomatoes enjoyed by the affluent summer population.

“They are medically under-served,” Carmen said. “There are not enough healthcare providers to take care of them. You think of the Hamptons as being so wealthy, but behind the curtains are so many other people.”

It was a desire to do something tangible to improve healthcare for hard working, uninsured East End people, that inspired the first annual “Honoring the Hands,” a wine-tasting event on Thursday, July 16. For every ticket sold, one farm worker gets a full physical and health evaluation at one of the HRH health centers. The benefit will take place at Martha Clara Vineyard, presenting Shelter Islanders with another opportunity to help neighbors in need.

In 1998, shortly after moving back to New York from Pennsylvania, Carmen decided to find the family a beach home in a quiet setting. The part about quiet ruled out the Hamptons and the Jersey Shore, and so she decided to try renting on Shelter Island. “The minute I got on that ferry, I said, this is it. I hadn’t even seen the house that I had rented.”

Carmen and her family spent the summers in the same house, which, after years of begging, the owners finally agreed to sell to her. “Fifteen years of family glue all tied to this house and this Island,” she said. “It’s a glue that you could not recreate anywhere.”

Carmen loves that there are no attractions on the Island. “At night we all sit together and tell stories, play games and read to each other,” she said. But not Scrabble. “Cubans play dominos.”

Over the years, some of her Island neighbors have become part of the family, too. When Carmen made the classic Cuban dish, ropa vieja, a stew of shredded beef and sauce, she had to tell her neighbors that the name translates as “old clothes.” Later they said, “We want that recipe for the dirty laundry.”

Carmen considers herself a progressive person, “but not about this place,” she said. “I don’t even really like to tell people about it. I want this house to be for the next three generations — my daughters and their daughters and my cousins and nieces and nephews, and I want Shelter Island to be the same.”

Carmen’s mother is now 88 and her father 83. Her success, like that of her two brothers who also went to college, is the fulfillment of a dream for her parents. “They are so proud,” she said. “That’s the vision I see when I see immigrants. I see a little me.”

Carmen radiates exhilaration for her work. “I’m going to do this until I die. I really feel that I am in this universe to help people who are ill,” she said. “There is so much to do in medicine … but right now it is Suffolk County.”

For information on how to attend or contribute to “Honoring the Hands” a wine-tasting event to benefit the HRH Community Health Center email Dorothy DeBiase at ddebiase@hrhcare.org or call 914-734-8736.

07/06/2015

When I was a kid my family lived in Florida where aquatic wildlife is commonplace. Our neighbor had two feral alligators in a wading pool in his yard. When we went to a park or the beach we saw bottlenose dolphins, manatees and whales.

My two younger sisters and I especially loved our visits to Weeki Wachee Springs, a roadside attraction that featured live mermaids swimming in clear spring water. Like so many girls, I dreamed of growing a green tail covered with jewel-like scales so I could swim underwater with my long hair streaming behind me.

Now I am an adult with grown sons and no fins, but judging from the thousands who turned out last Saturday for the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade, I suspect I am not the only person who still daydreams about what life would be like as a marine mammal.

Lately, I relate more to whales. And why not? I am drawn to the sea, love to swim, enjoy eating fish and believe that a little blubber in the right places is acceptable. I eagerly follow all whale-related news.

I was thrilled to hear about the sightings last fall in Greenport Harbor and South Ferry of a Northern Right Whale, an endangered species. I’m told a North Ferry crew member spotted the whale during a morning crossing from Greenport to Shelter Island, and accepted the whale’s resident one-way ferry pass.

A few weeks ago, while sitting on the porch with my husband, I read an article in the New York Times about new research into the behavior of whales that revived and reframed my childhood dream of the life aquatic.

“Postmenopausal female whales play a crucial role in the survival of killer whales. With extensive know­ledge of their environment, female whales lead younger whales to food in time of scarcity.”

Since I myself am a post-menopausal mammal that often leads her family to food, I felt immediate kinship with those female orcas.

In fact, I may have said out loud, “I think I’m an orca.” More than once, because my husband said, “O.K., you’re a New Yorker.”

“Not a New Yorker,” I said, “an orca, a killer whale.”

I imagined myself as a whale matriarch, 6,000 pounds of slippery fun swimming with my pod, leading younger whales to a large school of fish in Gardiners Bay. The article went on to say that the largest male whales stay closest to their mothers, because they need to eat much more than the smaller whales to avoid starvation. That aligns with my mother/son experience.

I was lost in reverie, with a 10,000-pound whale-son on my dorsal fin, and a 9,000-pound son just behind him, counting on me to avoid starvation. They needed me even more than when they were little calves nursing for 5 to10 seconds several times an hour, which, I learned, is how often baby orcas nurse. Showing the kids where to find fish would be easy compared to that.

Menopause? How does a female whale even survive menopause? Raging hot flashes in a three-ton mammal with no sweat glands would be an invitation to a lobster boil. If you held a crustacean to my forehead, it could cook in twenty minutes. And what if I developed bone density problems? It can’t be easy to get high-impact exercise in 400 feet of seawater.

Do I really have what it takes to be a killer whale? Do whales get down time? When does a female orca get to put her fins up? In charge of feeding the pod for decades, would I run out of innovative ways to serve fish?

Like humans, female killer whales stop giving birth by about 40, but can live into their 90s. Researchers posit that “the wisdom of elders” improves the survival rate of offspring and could explain why female killer whales and humans continue to live long after they have stopped reproducing.

At last I have biological justification for my compulsion to offer unwanted advice to my adult children. It turns out the survival of our species may even depend on mothers like me, who say to their offspring, “Are you sure you want to eat that?”

“What’s for dinner?” said my (human) husband. His question broke my reverie and brought me back to my chair on the porch.

“I think we’ll have salmon,” I said, “and I know just where to find it.”